Sophomore year of college has come and gone; it is now time to stumble into summer plans, despite having taken my last exam of the quarter six days ago. That Monday’s final was for Human Behavioral Biology, and looking back, it would have been like any other exam if not for a surreal element I noticed. See, it’s been nearly four years since I first stumbled upon a Reddit post about Robert Sapolsky’s YouTube playlist, and I’m proud to say that since then, I’ve matriculated to Stanford University, where I just completed his course as his student. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. My one regret about it is that I never spoke with Professor Sapolsky informally to thank him for how much he’s influenced me. Due to family matters, he had to be conservative with his exposure to students, and thus lectures had to be remote.

“Happy New Year!” I typed into iMessage on my phone back in January, before quickly deleting it. “Here’s to a less dumpster-fire year?” I typed. Send.

Night and day. It’s my go-to response when someone asks me how school has been this fall. In-person human interaction has been a game-changer, and I am trying to make the most of it. Although last year presented excellent opportunities and exposed me to a lot of prospects about which to be excited, it was also lukewarm introduction to college. Quite a lot has happened in the intervening time for all of us, I’m sure, and I’ve just tried to keep trucking.

Having planned most of the day out months in advance, it did not take a long time to locate the check-in site for my dormitory when I moved into college this morning. I’d picked the easiest slot to get my key. There wasn’t much luggage for me to bring—only my carry-on from the plane ride (which looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa), my backpack, and a few purchases we’d grabbed from a local Target. “What do you think of this room?” my mother asked when we arrived. “It will do,” I said. Indeed, it will. Frankly, any space of my own that’s large enough for some jumping jacks is enough for me.

Days are getting shorter. Leaves on the trees are beginning to shrivel. My inbox is pummeled with another onslaught of emails every day. Summer is crawling to its end, in other words, and I could not be more glad. It seems like an abnormal sentiment, and perhaps it is, but after the coronavirus started a pandemic and so rudely rewrote the story of my coming of age, “normal” is a haunting word with an ambiguous significance, if any at all.

It took me over a year and a half to write my debut novel An Invincible Summer, so I grew familiar with the text. So much so that often it was difficult to go through the sentences objectively and decide what was missing or what ought to be taken away. I was lucky to have people in my circles who were willing to provide their fresh perspectives and help me round things out, though. Specifically, because of the duration over which I wrote this text, I worried about cohesion and awkwardness since I was interrupted from writing so many times. Since then, I have tried to update my methods; the process of writing a novel is not the same as writing an email or an essay. As the fundamental laws of physics change when an object goes from the quantum scale to a normal Newtonian size, so a novel is not governed, necessarily, by the same principles as most forms of writing. A novel is a sea of words—musings, references, dialogues, and subplots—and often when rereading my own draft, I hardly recognized what I had written. It’s no simple task to juggle all of the information in the book in my head at the same time as I would for an essay, email, or short story. That’s where those new perspectives are helpful.

Take a look at the featured image of the eBags Pro Slim Laptop Backpack. After lots of research, I decided to snatch one of these almost a year ago when it was on discount. Seemed like the perfect backpack for carrying my belongings around campus, but I never ended up needing to open it. How ironic it is that on the package it says “your journey starts here.” I had it all planned out how I was going to begin college in California, but for obvious reasons, those plans were thwarted. Every quarter of the school year for me took place remotely on the first floor of my parents’ house. I did not want this experience, but it had to be endured, for I never considered a gap year or any such detour to be an option.

That’s another quarter in the books. This morning, I completed my final math exam and now have some space to consider the highs and lows of the past ten weeks, what I learned and what I did not. There are plenty of milestones to recount, so let’s get started. In January, our seven-week winter break came to an end, and I had mixed feelings about returning to virtual school. On the one hand, the break had given me the opportunity to write a 34,000-word short story and catch up on rest, but on the other hand, I knew that the planet had to keep spinning on its axis and I had to resume my responsibilities as a student. Besides, I had a bit of anticipation because I was supposed to be heading to campus for the quarter, and that was a new experience I had to look forward to. However, with a couple of days until the quarter started, reopening plans were canceled for the second time after several reaffirmations, and we students were all catapulted into the throes of winter quarter with pitifully low morale. I wasn’t sure how to react when I heard the news. I almost began to smile, not because I was happy, but because I was sad. This time, the emotional desolation of the cancelation felt like it was my fault. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.